Saturday, 9 May 2015

Mother Tongue

This
year* marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Anthony
Burgess’s Earthly Powers, a novel that abounds in examples of significant
coincidence, or what Carl Jung theoretically designated synchronicity. That it
should fall on a year in which a pope on the fast-track to sainthood, John Paul
II, and a world-famous novelist, Saul Bellow, die within days of each other and
so have their earthly careers recapped everywhere in adjacent
obituaries—newspapery versions of the novel’s twinned lives, as it were—is a
coincidence which I trust the shade of the author is chortling over, between
bouts of pointlessly pushing rocks up hills and whatnot, down—or is it up?—in
Purgatory (Dante’s cosmography is as headachy as an M.C. Escher lithograph). The
existence of Purgatory is of course still maintained by the Church that Burgess
defected from, which is perhaps not the case with the Rome rendered in Earthly
Powers, with its “now much impaired eschatology” (EP, 20), an allusion to
post-Vatican II liberalizing tendencies that John Paul II, immovably conservative,
famously arrested or reversed in most cases. Karol was no Carlo—sad, one
ventures to say, to say. But then Bellow was no Toomey, whose novels, referred
to in elderly retrospect, sound as embarrassingly medieval and outmoded as any
Thomistic treatise; his memoirs, thankfully, are thoroughly modern.

John
Paul II was responsible for a less well-known difference between Burgess’s
fictional Rome and our own real one: he abolished the office of advocatus
diaboli, or devil’s advocate, which means now no novelist will ever be invited,
as Toomey was, to offer alternate truths about, or variant readings of, the
life-history of a candidate for sanctity. And thank God for that, one
can almost hear the Vatican mandarins mumble. Because who ever expected a
novelist to tell the truth about a person’s life? “We lie for a living,” Toomey
himself points out to the archbishop who brings the invitation (12); stating
the facts is the job of biographers (who, however, go by the name of
hagiographers when they work for a Church and hacks when they work for a
Party). Most civilized secularists surely believe, though, that novelists do
tell the truth about human lives—just not the approved truth, presented in
convenient simplifications serving partisan or dogmatic ends (as when, perhaps,
a saintly Polish pope is sung to sleep by uncritical televeised encomia in
another instance of what Bellow has called “event glamour”). Novelists like
Bellow balk at indoctrinating generalizations, and prefer stories with nuance
and complexity—with details, the bane of dogmatists and spin-doctors,
because the devil is in them. Such writers make natural devil’s advocates,
because they record the minutiae of individuality, ambiguity, and accident that
muddy the purity of official accounts, and their tools, or their weapons, are
words. Earthly Powers, which recounts two world wars, also dramatizes an
eternal battle over language, pitting churchly custodians of sacred texts and
symbols against writers who insit on unrestricted experiment in the artistic
faith that language can reveal truths of its own, if it’s allowed to.

“We
are forced by the very nature of language to generalize” (121), Carlo argues
once, and the platitudinous pontifications and glib aphorisms he offers in the
role of Gregory XVII on television—his sound-bite theologizing—certainly seem
to confirm his point. While he is able to generalize and simplify his message
for the benefit of “huge congregations in football stadia and baseball parks”
(599), it’s a different matter for literary practitioners of “the big subtle
stuff crammed with ambiguities” (643), as exemplified by the subjects of the
“Joyce Proust Mann course” (642) that an in-law of Toomey teaches, as well as
by the works of Jakob Strehler, Burgess’s fictional equivalent of these authors
(and presumably Robert Musil and Joseph Roth). Toomey’s own fiction is much
like Carlo’s religion—a mass product packaged in “comfortingly flaccid
language” (300), full of “melodrama, very simple and very crude” (643), the
stuff most people need in order to “cope with life” (643), a literary corollary
of popular faith. And yet Toomey’s volume of memoirs constitutes something more
like the “great and difficult”(301) family saga of Strehler. It’s a
self-confessed second-rater’s autobiography with regret at its core, but it has
redemption as its aim—a novelized life written as compensation and amends for a
career of lifeless novels, as well as a riposte to critics inner and outer
delivered “posthumously, posthumously” (1). It supplies no pat answers to the
questions it raises, and it is crammed with detail and, hence, devilry—some of
it literal, but most of it just hermeneutical—and it seems to live up to what
Toomey’s novels never could have, namely the proviso that if language is a
writer’s sole earthly power, it had better be good.

Turning
to the devilish details of the narrative, with its uncanny concurrences and
unsettling parallels, we can see a comparatively comic, unmomentous example of
them early on, when the eighty-first birthday of Kenneth Toomey, world-renowned
author, turns out to be also the birthday of an obscure poet named Scriberras,
in the Malta where Toomey is then living. “We had to have him along,” Toomey’s
embarrassed hostess explains, “and he took the wrong turning out of the loo and
barged into the kitchen, and there he saw the damned cake. Then he said how
thoughtful and kind and the rest of it. Apparently it’s his birthday as well as
yours, and he doesn’t know it’s yours”(21). The guests, among them a British
Council official and the Poet Laureate, conspire to spare the poet the
disappointment of finding it’s not his anniversary that’s being honoured, but a
drunk blurts the truth, and the poet, whose face was a “smiling moon of
delight” (31) as Happy Birthday was sung, defends his right to be fêted: “You
make a mistake. It is my birthday” (32). His childish reluctance to
share the cake and candles is no less naïve and unsophisticated than his
responses to the literary talk that previously passes between Toomey and his
fellow author, Dawson Wignall, O.M. When Wignall cites the Cambridge School
theory of ‘stock response’ to explain Toomey’s teary-eyed reactions to terms
like faith and duty, and Toomey’s paid companion drunkenly guffaws, Scriberras
cries, “It is not to be laughed at” (25); and, as the celebrants drink more and
begin to argue over principles, he unabashedly cuts in with his own folksy
philosophy, adding, with the firmness of the true believer, “it is also that we
do not sneer at duty and at the faith we are taught at home” (30). Certain
words, this mediocre versifier evidently comprehends, can be potent and
precious, or perhaps sacred would be the term he, as a good Catholic, would
apply. His own words, however, he’s quite casual about, blurting out a sonetto
off-handedly and expressing more wonder at the dream that inspired it than at
the poem itself. By contrast, Wignall, a highly literate, nominal Anglican,
invests all his emotion in his own work, and reacts with a pained howl when
it’s flippantly recited over dessert. No mere stock response, this, any more
than is his sputtering impatience with a remark that the novelist Herman Hesse
is “above language” and hence undiminished by translation: “No writer is above
language. Each is his own language… [I]deas? Damn it, Shakespeare had no ideas
worth talking about”(29). He’s trembling as he says this, his eyes brimming
with tears, as Toomey’s had been earlier—and all for words, those harmless
everyday things that modern literary theory and modern litterateurs like Toomey
have supposedly “empt[ied]…of meaning” (459). Toomey himself does not really
believe this, of course, and at once point he even uneasily asks Carlo if
“language is of diabolic provenance” (121); Carlo answers that it is “one of
our trials and sorrows” (121), and the diplomat hosting the birthday party
would certainly concur. In vain does he, a professional builder of bridges
between cultures and dinner guests by means of blandly tactful talk, try to restore
good feeling, and the evening ends on a sour note. Toomey’s placement of this
episode at the start of his account of Carlo and his Gregorian reforms seems
instructive; if a mere party can fall foul over linguistic and literary
allegiances in this way, what will happen when the age-old, dug-in dogmas and
dialects of the Catholic Church get doctored with? What powers has Carlo, with
his gambler’s recklessness, unleashed?

Scriberras,
a minor character in a book that has many, nonetheless plays a major role as
the embodiment of what’s later called “the unformed mentality of childhood”
which, spiritually, everyone “want[s] to get back [to]. Faith and loyalty and
duty. The church on the hill and the known names in the graveyard…. Faith
cannot move forward to new loyalties and duties. We are loyal only to our
mothers.” Such, at any rate, is the view of an Anglican archbishop, commenting
on the cross-cultural, inter-religious dialogue Carlo was in the midst of
fostering, but “dear Carlo is wrong” (552), he concludes, and Toomey comes to
share the clergyman’s misgivings about changing the Church. To de-Latinize the
liturgy and adapt the symbols of the Mass to suit local cultures is only to
invite the kind of confusing language-lesson Toomey finds himself forced to
give his Muslim servant Ali, who’s as jealously protective of his name for God
as Scriberras is of his candles and concept of duty:

“Once, Ali,
in Catholic churches all over the world, they used the Latin name Deus.
But now they have what is called the vernacular, since very few ordinary people
know Latin. In mosques all over the world they say Allah, but in
Catholic churches all over the world they use the vernacular. In Serbo-Croat Bog,
in Finnish Jumala, I think, and in Swahili, I know, Mungu. Now
here in Malta their language is a kind of Arabic, though it uses the alphabet
of the Romans. And in Arabic and Maltese the word for God is the same—Allah. Is
that moderately clear?”

It was clear, he said, but it seemed
somehow bad. (19)

Not just badness but real evil—in
one of the book’s many examples of unintended consequences—results from
similarly ill-advised clerical fiddling with cultural intangibles, as Toomey’s
linguist nephew becomes himself a trope in a gruesome misreading of the Mass.
The Eucharist, thanks to the Vatican’s confusing new policies, gets interpreted
with cannibalistic literalism by an African tribe (680 ff), and Carlo, Toomey
feels, must ultimately answer for this death. In this and other instances the
papal reforms disclose a dark side, which for Toomey is proof of the blindness
of their author. To his mind, the moneymaking “shaman and showman” (501), whose
thrusting ambition flies in the face of the adage from the Theologica
Germanica that “nothing burns in hell but self will” (cf. Carlo’s dogged
comment that “will prevails…there is never any failure of [my] will” (382)),
derives his relentlessly progressive, almost Panglossian, Pelagianism from his
own lights, his own willfulness, and not from the Spirit he is supposed to be
serving. His doctrinaire positivism, with its insistence on the goodness of
humanity and on the devil as the sole instigator of evil, repeatedly fails to
do philosophical justice to the unsavoury realities the novel recounts, and for
Toomey, Hortense and other chracters who don’t share his vision, this
misreading of modern history seems inexcusable. Misprision on such a scale—by
no less than the spiritual guide of a universal Church—must have grave
repercussions in some form or other, it is implied, and an excerpt from
Hobbes’s Leviathan (whose “Soveraign Powers” is the source of the novel’s
title) darkly hints of punishable perverters of the truth. There are at work in
the world, according to Hobbes, “a Confederacy of Deceivers, that to obtain
dominion over men in this present world, endeavour by dark and erroneous
Doctrines to extinguish in them the Light, both by Nature, and of the Gospell;
and so to dis-prepare them for the Kingdome of God to come” (459). No final
conclusion is drawn about who might fit Hobbes’s description of a
“Deceiver”—whether irreligious writers and composers whose fripperies corrupt
public taste, or renegade churchmen who mislead millions with unfounded
spiritual optimism—but Michelangelo’s fresco of Christ the Judge dealing out
doom appears and reappears throughout the narrative, and only the book’s
Hollywood hedonists and Hitlerite fanatics are unafraid that their actions
might have eternal consequences. Carlo is gambling with his own soul, it is
implied, as well as with the soul of his church, and his cardplayer’s
win-some-lose-some insouciance, given the drastic scale of the stakes, makes
Toomey wonder in retrospect whose side his brother-in-law had really been on.
In a telling episode, in which he attempts to de-condition a captured Nazi by
means of torture (it is more a battle of wills than an exorcism of spirits, but
Carlo is convinced of the rightness of his methods) he reaches a moment of
breakthrough when the worn-out fascist finally sees through all his political
indoctrination to a latent humanity and decency. At this point Carlo
confidently dons the hat of a Freudian interpreter of dreams:

One
morning Liebeneiner said that he had dreamed he was dead.

“Ah. You are, of course, officially
dead.”

“I saw my dead body. It was on a great battlefield.
I looked down on my own body and thousands of others. I wept.”

“You wept for your own body or all the
bodies?”

“I don’t know. I wept. The bodies were
of my comrades dead in battle.”

“You couldn’t see that they were your
comrades. They were just the bodies of dead men. And yet they were your
comrades.”

“There were women too. Naked. Everybody
was naked. I could not stop weeping. When I woke up my eyes were wet.” (487)

At first glance the meaning of
this epiphany appears to be as Carlo glosses it: a militant idealogue now sees,
on a battlefield he once divided between friends and enemies, only the
“comrades” of a common humanity, their lives needlessly wasted in divisiveness.
But the dream has another interpreataion in the context of the book as a whole.
Carlo, a loyal soldier in “the long war” (295) between good and evil,
completely certain of how the troops are aligned on the spiritual battlefield
of the modern world, nevertheless repeatedly appears to serve the interests of
the enemy, most notably when he miraculously heals a child in a hospital who
grows up to be a messianic cult leader and mass-murderer. (This figure, Godfrey
Manning, later assumes the fugitive alias of Carlton Goodlett, a name that
could be taken as an implicit designation of his status as a sort of evil Carlo
or anti-Pope—or, perhaps, as a spiritual son of Carlo, who after all has given
him new life. In this role, he’s as ironically, or diabolically, mismatched
with his father as the petty criminal Heinz Strehler is with his father Jakob,
the literary master and martyr and author of Vatertag.) Carlo himself,
as well, admits that his pontificate seems to have been endorsed or even
facilitated by a senior devil (588), who may have paved the way for his
preferred candidate by killing a competing cardinal, which raises the
possibility that Carlo’s pontificate is really a pawn of the wrong powers, and
that his reforms are ruinous by infernal design. In the context of these
cosmic-sized ironies, the dream of a battlefield strewn with combatants of
unclear allegiance can stand as an emblem of Carlo himself, enigmatic
footsoldier in God-knows-whose army.

Poor
troubled Toomey, whose apostacy is pained and problematic throughout the book,
and whose mediocre art reflects a mediocre character ill-equipped to confront
these outsized teleological imponderables, hopes or prays at the end of the
book for a sleep which, alluding to Hamlet’s “sleep of death” and probably
Egmont’s “Süßer Schlaf,” seems to be a metaphor for mercy—for compassionate
deliverance from the anguish of not knowing the outcome of the clash of the
powers that “fierce” Carlo cheerfully engages with, and what side, for good or
ill, Toomey himself took in the fight. Did his instinctive shove of Heinrich
Himmler out of the path of a bullet, for instance, constitute an unpardonable
sin? Did a lifetime frittered away on travel and triviality merit damnation?
“Will he let us sleep?” he asks Hortense at the end of the book, and she tries
to reassure him by saying that the “one article of faith” (705) remaining to
her is that “if we suffer enough [in this life], we’ll kindly be allowed to
sleep. Christ wrung at least that much out of the father” (519). Toomey,
despite his rationalist credentials, seems at the end almost a conventional
believer, having been forced into his lifelong religious disenfranchisement by
a biological mischance, not out of any Faustian bravado. Home and family are
what he finally longs for; whatever eternal perdition might await him, there is
hell enough in this life, and he tires of it at last: “it’s hell being lonely.
I’ve been lonely all my life. When Carlo opted for loneliness I knew what I’d
always suspected. That he wasn’t, isn’t human. It’s like opting for hell”
(634). Leaving, in old age, “the real fight, the struggle with form and
expression, unwon” (4), and leaving also the bigger battle that Carlo fought in
to look after itself, he returns to the peace, so to speak, of Battle, his
hometown in Sussex, and there he finds his family again, in a reunion of sorts
with his sister, his brother (long dead, but whose voice on LP is repeatedly
said to reproduce the “real presence” of Tom—a way of saying their brotherly
bond is a sort of sacrament), and his mother, at least in spirit (it’s really
Tom portraying her in a comic skit). “Leave well alone, do you hear, Hortense,
Kenneth,” he mimics in a motherly voice (705), and the advice is not as
generically parental as it might at first seem; it had been issued earlier by
Wignall the poet, bland Anglican or agnostic (Toomey sees the two terms as
virtual synonyms), and comes in the course of a conversation about Catholicism
as a religion that unwisely invites confrontation with mysteries that are best
left alone. Anglicanism, he says, is a strategic compromise with the
supernatural or paranormal, an arms-length acknowledgement of the “damned
hairraising” (682) stuff that Carlo embraces—that God (“or something”) that
“rides upon the storm,” as Toomey worriedly quotes (705), and that appears at
one point to comically topple a seagoing Anglican archbishop (238), as if to
chide a heretic. Toomey does not seem unwilling to take the maternal advice
and, as an answer to his loneliness if not to his intellectual misgivings, to
take some comfort in a nostalgic return to the old, Pre-Carlo rites of Mother
Church, as administered by “a young French priest”—a priest speaking, in other
words, the language of his mother: “we can even confess in French, I suppose,
in the foredawn candles” (703). His approving mention of these objects reminds
one of Scriberras the poetaster, a simple soul nourished by simple symbols, and
as such not so unlike Toomey in his needy old age.

When
the Anglican archbishop had spoken previously of ultimate loyalty to one’s
mother, and of how he believed faith could not move forward to loyalties and
duties beyond that, he added that “if Carlo can do it, he is exceptional in his
loneliness” (552). It seems, on the face of it, a fair judgment, because when
motherless Carlo “elect[s] loneliness” (593) and dramatically disowns his
friends and family (“I don’t want any of you”), he certainly seems to be
leaving the world of normal emotional allegiances for some sort of sanctity, or
else superhuman folly (he seems like one of Beckett’s steely loners here), but
he is not alone in being so alone. Another figure in the book is a match for
him in terms of isolation, as well as in the commanding strength of his
personality and his militant devotion to principle. This is Jakob Strehler, the
great Austrian author who refuses to leave Nazi-occupied Europe and works on in
imperturbable solitude, shotgun at the ready (like the line from Eliot, “the
trowel in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster”). He, like Carlo, wars
with devils—purely political ones in his case, although there are theological
overtones to his battle too. He is translating, after all, a medieval prophecy
of the Third Reich, a narrative poem in Latin about an army of rats with
swastikas on their ensigns that overruns Austria, lead by a “king rat…called Adolphus”
(448). Toomey replies with an appalled “good God” to this, an appropriately
theistic exclamation, whether or not he is specifically recalling Carlo in a
low moment “see[ing] the devil in the corner of the living room…assum[ing] the
guise of a large rat, whose sleek fur and bright teeth [he] admired
extravagantly in various languages” (382)—a vision, or visitation, this, which
occurred on the night that Carlo learned of his own bastardy, in a foretaste of
his final, total loneliness. Strehler, no less isolated a figure as he is lead
off to certain death in a concentration camp, sings serenely, despite the SS
men surrounding him, in Latin—the same language Carlo uses in the company of
devils. “Strehler’s heart was light,” Toomey observes, because “he had produced
great work which would outlast the Nazis” (453); he was “alive, like Heine and
Mendelssohn, and the Nazis are merely the stuff of television movies” (454). He
has won, in other words, his war. There is something celebratory, in a
eucharistic sense, in the descriptions of his rural sequestration (“the water
from my well is like wine”; “I have learned to make bread, more satisfying than
the making of novels” (448-9)), and the way in which he and Toomey pass a week,
“relaxed and stimulated,” in the quiet woods, while vast historical events
circle around them, is reminiscent of another long intricate novel whose plot
is shaped, like that of Earthly Powers, by metaphysical coincidences and
ironies, namely Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. No less than
Strehler, Pasternak was a master-novelist who worked on in defiance of
totalitarian powers arrayed against him, and now “lives” on through Zhivago
in the canon of world literature, while the Soviet Union fades into history.
Impending canonization in Carlo’s case, on the other hand, is no conclusive
proof that he has successfully defeated any evil empire, as he himself seemed
to point out to Toomey on the night of the infamous confrontation with the
Malayan warlock. “It’s a long war,” he says, and urges Toomey to content
himself, despite the loss of his beloved companion Philip, with life’s “small
victories.” Indeed, of the two great men in the book, Carlo comes away looking
by far the the more problematical candidate for sainthood. Strehler, whose work
celebrates “the greater glory of life” (301) and has proven salvific power
(“the great life-enhancer reconciled me to the world again,” Toomey says after
finishing Vatertag), looks like a hero or a martyr of art, and even
though when Toomey finds him he is estranged from his wife and uninterested in
seeing his son again, he could never be accused of inhumanity in the way that
Toomey accuses Carlo after he rejects his family and friends. After all,
Strehler’s freely elected loneliness has been in order to create “a great but
difficult comic masterpiece as mad and as sane as Rabelais” (301) which,
significantly, is about a family—flawed and fallible, but warmly rendered,
“loud, quarrelsome, always sympatisch” (301). Strehler’s loneliness draws him
closer to the meaning of family, the primal human bond, and his Bürgers, like
Joyce’s Blooms of Dublin, are proof of it. His book “denies the possibility of
progress”(301), depicting a world which is “undemocratic and infested with
police spies but is also charming, comic and creative”(300); it magnanimously
accepts and upholds, in other words, human nature as it is, on its own terms,
rather than seeking to alter or “improve” it, to force it to conform to some
imposed model—an impulse which, troublingly, puts well-intentioned Carlo in the
same company as the Nazis and Godfrey Manning. There is something humourless
and inhumanly earnest about passionate reformers, and a sense of humour may the
chief indicator in the book of the only sort of sanctity that Toomey is
prepared to endorse. His brother Tommy, who produces comedy that is of a lesser
order than Strehler’s but no less worthy, is repeatedly presented as a possible
saint, albeit in Toomey’s qualified, humanistic sense of the term (he’s a
“decent man who countered the world’s horrors with an easy humour”(471), “a man
who did no harm to anyone, who brought a good deal of harmless pleasure into
people’s lives”(421)).

But if by the end of the book
Carlo looks considerably diminished after Toomey has stripped away the robes of
holiness that the canonizers had been preparing to dress him in (as Hortense
had stripped the clothes from St. Ambrose, in her basso-relievo) he is still a
sympathetic figure, with his Falstaffian appetites and his very human
compassion, on occasion, for his friends. When he rushes to help Toomey in
Malaya he seems even noble, and after his failure to save Philip, he still
tries to console his distraught brother-in-law, as mentioned, with talk of
life’s “small victor[ies].” Toomey, who lacks both Carlo’s faith and Strehler’s
imaginative genius, bristles at this appeal to a philosophical largeness of
soul, as would most of us, one suspects, given our instinctive preference for
certainties and symbols that simplify rather than intensify the mystery of
existence: “I made noises of rage, hatred, frustration, loss. ‘Stop that,’ he
cried. ‘Rejoice. For God’s sake try to rejoice’”(295).

If some poor, Toomey-like mortal were ever tempted
to pick, after the seven hundred pages of Strehlerian complexity or Bellovian
abundance that is Earthly Powers, a single phrase with which to simplify the
meaning or message of its author, that last admonition of Carlo’s might well be
it.

*This essay was written in 2005.

All page references are to the first North American mass market paperback edition, i.e.: